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America’s working class let out a primal scream last week, and it is echoing everywhere.

Election maps showed how much of the United States turned red on Tuesday. Pundits and historians will debate for years exactly how this happened: sexism, racism, angst, a revolt against cronyism, some of these or all of these.

But one thing is clear:��The despair of the lower middle classes was cast into sharp relief, and the ruling elites in America were exposed as stunningly oblivious to the extent of their disaffection.

Throughout the campaign many of our intellectual leaders heaped contempt on what they called the “uneducated.” By uneducated, they meant people without college educations and advanced degrees.

In other words, most people.

In fact, Wikileaks revealed top Democratic officials to be more closely affiliated with the 1 percent than with the people they sought to govern.

Now we’re all being forced to deal with the aftermath. For us here in Hawaii, a state so closely identified with the Democratic Party, the results are particularly problematic. Some of our biggest problems will take federal funding to fix, and soon we won’t have many allies in the executive branch of the U.S. government.

For Democrats, this was a self-inflicted wound. The party rose to power in the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s by seeking to improve the lives of not just the poorest poor, but also the working class of America. Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s plucky secretary of labor, built the social safety net we call the New Deal based on people’s willingness to work long and hard for protections like Social Security and unemployment insurance — benefits they earned through their paid labor.

Everywhere I go I see people who have lost their teeth to decay and don’t have the money to get dental implants.

Of course, it’s easier to detect the despair of the homeless, the refugee living in a tent. But the desolation of the working class — the ordinary, average people — is also visible to those who have eyes to see.

Since I returned to the islands after 30 years on the mainland, some childhood friends have asked what changes here have disturbed me the most. The increased density of development is of course the obvious answer, and the one they expect me to cite.

But no. I’d say the thing that has saddened me most is how poverty has become more pervasive. Everywhere I go I see people who have lost their teeth to decay and don’t have the money to get dental implants. Smiling and singing are big parts of being happy. Instead, people are being forced to pinch their lips together to hide their poverty. How can people possibly afford glossy white false teeth when the average wage in Hawaii, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last month, is $896 a week?

With wages so low and the cost of housing so high, more and more people in Hawaii can’t afford non-essentials and are falling into the ranks of the poor. When the Hawaii Public Housing Authority opened the application window for Section 8 rental housing assistance vouchers for three days in August, it received 10,655 applications for help — and found that virtually all the applicants were properly eligible for such assistance.

For a family of four, “very low income” is defined in Hawaii as about $792 a week for a family of four.

About half of the applicants, 5,175, were employed, but earned so little money that they qualified for rental assistance.

They won’t get it. There were only 200 spots available.

Low wages and bad job prospects are fueling a sense of desperation in many other places as well.

So here in the islands, we are accustomed to saying, well, if it’s so hard here, perhaps we should move to the mainland, someplace cheaper.

What the election results underscored, however, is that low wages and bad job prospects are fueling a sense of desperation in many other places as well.

In the past year, I’ve had the chance to visit a number of cities on the mainland and see for myself. I went to Pittsburgh for a funeral, for example, and saw mile after mile of boarded-up houses. It is a former industrial powerhouse laid low by massive job loss.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, an hour from Boston’s glittering skyline, I saw little cafes struggling for existence in abandoned factory buildings.

On another trip, I stayed near the waterfront on a visit to San Francisco. When I arrived at my motel, a homeless man, obviously mentally ill, was shouting on the curb and frightening passersby. When I checked out of the motel three days later, another homeless man had taken his place.

We took a vacation to the mainland in the summer. My husband and I loaded our car on the Pasha ferry and picked it up in Los Angeles. Our goal was to visit the country’s small towns, cruising the back roads and seeing the parts of the country that we had never visited.

Over a lifetime we’d done the national parks and seen the tourist highlights. This time we wanted to try to experience the nation’s heartland. You know, an old-fashioned vacation.

We headed east from Las Vegas, mostly bypassing the big cities. Soon after we passed Colorado and left behind the visual grandeur of the West, we began to notice a large number of abandoned farms.

The formerly bustling rural centers were littered with vacant storefronts. Willa Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud, Nebraska, looked like a dressed-up ghost town.

We decided to pick up the pace. We wanted to get away from the poverty we were seeing. We shifted to the interstate highway and headed east as quickly as possible.

In Belleville, Kansas, a sad-eyed waitress asked us whether we thought life might be better for her in Denver. We said we had heard that rents there had risen—that a studio apartment in the city now costs $1,000 a month. She sighed. That’s more than I make in a month, she told us.

The only thing you can say about Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown of Mark Twain, is that it is making an effort to revitalize itself.

Laclede, Missouri, the hometown of General John Pershing, the hero of World War I, looks down on its heels. Ditto for Walt Disney’s hometown of Marceline, Missouri, once so prosperous and bustling that he used it in designing his model for a prototype small town, which he called Main Street, at Disneyland.

Somewhere around St. Louis, we got quiet. We decided to pick up the pace. We wanted to get away from the poverty we were seeing. We shifted to the interstate highway and headed east as quickly as possible.

In Indianapolis, we arrived late and ended up staying in a motel that had been turned into transient lodging for the lower-middle class.�� They looked like people we would once have described as owning tidy suburban homes.

At the end of the next day we arrived in Washington. We went to a French bistro for dinner and ate outdoors on the sidewalk. The restaurant was packed with prosperous and content D.C. insiders. We had a delicious meal and tried to drink away the memories of what we had just seen.

Can Trump make a difference? Can he restore good-paying jobs to a country that needs them? It seems implausible, probably impossible.��He managed to convince a significant share of the population he could. Only time will tell.

But we do know one thing. What we needed was for Washington insiders to look at us, the American people, and instead it turned out they were only looking at each other.